A memorial for Jane Jacobs, the legendary Greenwich Village community activist and urban planner, was held in Washington Square Park on June 28. Among the speakers were her son, Ned Jacobs, shown above, at left, talking with another of the speakers, Paul Goldberger, architecture critic and dean of the Parsons School of Design at New School University. Other speakers included State Senator Tom Duane, Assemblymember Deborah Glick, Borough President Scott Stringer, Councilmember Rosie Mendez, Andrew Berman of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, Ron Shiffman, Sandy Ikeda, Erik Wensberg, Eliza Nichols, Mary Shamis, Hillary Brown and Elizabeth Yeampierre. Robert Tierney, chairperson of the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission, and Roberta Brandes Gratz, an L.P.C. commissioner, presented a city proclamation in honor of Jacobs. Jacobs, shown in the historic photo below, taken at the White Horse Tavern, led the fights to kill Robert Moses’ plan for a Lower Manhattan cross-town expressway across Broome St. and his West Village “slum clearance” project. Above right, Eliza Nichols held up a sign that Ned Jacobs remembers having to wear as a sandwich board while asking, “Would you help save our park?” The sign urged Villagers to write to Borough President Hulan Jack and Mayor Robert Wagner in protest of Moses’ plan to run a highway through Washington Square Park — another battle Jacobs was a part of. Jacobs’s seminal book, “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” has not gone out of print since it first appeared in 1961. Jacobs moved to Canada in 1968. She died on April 25 in Toronto at age 89.
